Category Archives: economy

Sure, let’s bring production onshore, but it might not ensure supplies

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Naoise McDonagh, University of Adelaide

The pandemic has changed the way we think about supply chains, in particular the chains that feed our need for food, medical supplies, and defence equipment.

It has led Prime Minister Scott Morrison to frame access to supplies in terms of economic sovereignty.

Andrew Liveris, now an advisor to Morrison, and a former Dow Chemical Chief and advisor to both the Obama and Trump administrations, is pushing for re-shoring of critical supply chains.

“Australia drank the free-trade juice and decided that off-shoring was okay,” he is quoted as saying. “Well, that era is gone.”

But ensuring supplies can withstand shocks needn’t mean bringing production onshore. It might make it harder.

Stockpiling isn’t that useful

Firms usually talk about managing supply risk in terms of resilience or robustness.

Canada has a strategic maple syrup reserve.

Robustness is the ability to continue supplying during a disruption (for a while we didn’t have this with toilet paper).

Resilience is the ability to get supplies back to normal in an acceptable time frame (which we had with toilet paper).

For critical supplies, robustness is the most important, but it hard to achieve for entire categories such as “medical equipment”. There, stockpiling is of limited use.

The United States has a stockpile of oil, enough to fill half of its car tanks. Canada has a vault of maple syrup, called a “strategic reserve” – about 80,000 barrels worth.

But when it comes to stockpiling “medical equipment” we might put a lot of effort into stockpiling ventilators, for example, only to find that the next emergency requires something different, or a different type of ventilator.

And it’s hard to stockpile fresh food.

We are exposed at choke points

Face masks and food illustrate the risks.

Half of global facemask production is concentrated in China. China’s factories closed during its lockdown at the time global demand simultaneously soared, resulting in a major shortages.

Australia is one of the most food-secure nations on earth, exporting far more than it needs, but a 2012 department of agriculture report found that many of the inputs, including pesticides and packaging, especially long-life packaging, were made overseas.



Read more:
Don’t panic: Australia has truly excellent food security

We got a taste of that vunerability in March 2020. After drought-breaking rains across the country generated a spike in demand for these essential farm inputs, supply tightened due to coronavirus-related restrictions in China.

The crunch led Australian farm supply firm Nufarm to publically warn that Australia was dangerously dependent upon China.

Disasters can happen here too

The best way to achieve supply chain robustness is to build supply chains involving more than one supplier, located in more than one national territory.

While worth considering as part of the solution, re-shoring won’t achieve this.

Japan’s 2011 Japan earthquake illustrates the point. Japan is self-sufficient in auto parts, but the earthquake hit the region that supplies them.



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If we do re-shore, it will make sense to continue to use at least one international supplier to ensure diversification. Self sufficiency isn’t the same as robustness.

Building robustness will require a federally-directed supply chain risk diversification strategy.

Self-sufficiency isn’t robustness

Given the extent of our trade with China, the best approach might be China-Plus-One. It could mean one stream of the supply of a good coming through China and another coming through, for example, Vietnam.

It’s an approach adopted by Japan.

Re-shoring can play a role, but we are going to need a top-down assessment of the risks facing supplies of critical goods, and quite possibly the imposition of robustness requirements on firms distributing them.

Those firms can be offered a diversification tax credit.

A robustness strategy would be more likely to be pro-trade rather than anti-trade, but we won’t know until we do the work. It’d be best to start before the next crisis.The Conversation

Naoise McDonagh, Lecturer in Political Economy, Institute for International Trade, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Melbourne’s second lockdown spells death for small businesses. Here are 3 things government can do to save them

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John Vaz, Monash University

The reimposition of stage 3 restrictions on metropolitan Melbourne is, as Victorian premier Daniel Andrews says, a matter of life or death. That’s also true for small businesses.

A further six weeks of stay-at-home orders for the city’s 5 million residents will kill off many small and medium sized businesses unless there are critical changes to federal and state government assistance policies.



Read more:
Six-week lockdown for Melbourne as record 191 new cases in latest tally

Even with assistance many will not survive. But ensuring those that are viable are not lost is crucial to the recovery of both the Victorian and national economies.

Small businesses are the engine of economic growth. They are typically the first to innovate and respond to economic changes. The abnormal economic shock wrought by the necessary public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic means they have generally been hit hardest. Without policies and money to address their core needs, this second wave of restrictions will be a killer blow.

Three fundamentals

These fundamentals are absolute to the success of small business.

First, and most obviously, they need customers. Those providing essential local goods and services, such as groceries or health services, may cope. But those offering discretionary goods and services, such as hospitality, will suffer both from loss of foot traffic and suppressed consumer spending, as people save more in uncertain times.

Second, they need access to credit. This is much harder for small businesses to obtain than large businesses with assets. Small businesses are typically started by entrepreneurs who finance their endeavours with their own savings, through mortgaging their homes, or taking out personal loans.

They typically have extremely limited cash reserves to ride out tough times. Many juggle their bills from month to month to stay afloat.

Third, they rely on momentum. They grow by acquiring both customers and knowledge of their market. When repeat business stop, they lose that momentum. If they have to shed employees, they lose “business knowledge”, which sets them back even further in their recovery.

Calamitous damage

All economic slowdowns typically reduce demand, but this health/economic crisis has calamitously damaged all three aspects.

The federal government’s Job Keeper program and subsidies being provided through the Australian Taxation Ofice to boost business cash flow has enabled business to hold on to employees for now. But without customers or credit, even extending these measures beyond their scheduled September 30 end won’t be enough.

It’s my view it will take three to five years for consumer confidence and spending to return to pre-COVID levels. This assessment is based on past recessions where high unemployment prevailed compounded by the novel problem that health fears will suppress consumer confidence long after the coronavirus is contained and things return to “normal” (or at least a new normal).



Read more:
Forget JobSeeker. In our post-COVID economy, Australia needs a ‘liveable income guarantee’ instead

The Melbourne outbreak of COVID-19 underlines there is no quick fix to the COVID-19 crisis. The only light at the end of tunnel is a possible a vaccine, which might take years, or never be found. The economy must therefore adjust. Not all businesses are viable. To continue indefinitely to pump public money into direct grants to prop them up is unsustainable.

To do so will lead to “perverse” consequences – providing windfalls to businesses that would have failed anyway – as many small business ventures do – while providing inadequate support to those that are important and would have survived but for the crisis.

Three suggestions

Therefore I offer three suggestions.

First, continue JobKeeper and the tax office’s cashflow boost for as long as COVID-19 restrictions are in place. Businesses would need to apply for this on a month-by-month basis, and need to meet set criteria.



Read more:
Forget JobSeeker. In our post-COVID economy, Australia needs a ‘liveable income guarantee’ instead

Second, the government should ensure easy access to low-interest loans for the next two to three years. Loans are more efficient than direct grants or subsidies. The fact the loans have to be repaid will encourage only those businesses with a good chance of being sustainable of seeking them.

Getting a loan is slow and hard for small businesses because banks scrutinise them due to the risk. Few small business have the skills to prepare the extensive documentation banks require. Banks will be motivated to lend faster and to more businesses if governments remove the risk by buying those loans.

To speed up the lending application process, there should also be subsidies to licensed financial advisers to prepare those applications.

Third, a system of subsidised vouchers for financial management advice from accountants and financial advisers (who are also mostly small businesses).

Financial services are critical for small businesses. In tough times it might be tempting to dispense with these services. But sound financial advice will be critical to business owners making the right decision – including whether they should be borrowing money to sustain their businesses or making the hard decision to cut their losses and move on.The Conversation

John Vaz, Senior Lecturer, Department of Banking and Finance, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.